Martin Schwarzschild, who died on 10 April, was at the centre of this scientific transformation. He was born and educated in pre-war Germany, arriving in the United States (via Norway) in 1937. After a decade of military service and junior positions at Harvard and Columbia, he moved to Princeton as a professor. There he joined Lyman Spitzer Jr, the two of them establishing Princeton University Observatory as a centre of excellence in theoretical astrophysics, often working together, until they both died within weeks of each other almost exactly half a century from their initial appointments in the spring of 1947.
Nature and nurture conspired to provide an ideal environment for Schwarzschild. His uncle, Robert Emden (a professor of physics and meteorology), published the famous book Gaskugeln (Gas Spheres) in 1907, establishing the treatment of stars as gaseous bodies within which the forces of Newton's gravity and gas pressure are in equilibrium. His father, Karl Schwarzschild, was the author of the famous Schwarzschild (spherical) solution to Einstein's equations. Martin became probably the leading developer of the theory of stellar evolution.
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